The 10 biggest tech grinches of 2012

Brains full of spiders, hearts full of unwashed socks, here are 2012's mean ones of tech

Dr. Seuss had it right. Most folks understand the true meaning of the season. Others, well, their brains are full of spiders and they have garlic in their souls.

While the tech industry is filled with kind and generous people, it also had its share of grinches over the past 12 months -- companies that took when it was better to give, individuals who looked out only for themselves.

Perhaps once filled with holiday spirit they'll undergo a last-minute transformation. But we're not betting on it.

They say nothing succeeds like excess, and Verizon is proof. In June the telecom giant announced it was laying off 1,700 workers, making for more than 40,000 positions axed since 2007. Verizon's executive compensation over the same period? A cool $350 million, topped by the $22.5 million take-home pay of CEO Lowell C. McAdam (pictured) -- most of it in the form of "performance awards." Turns out McAdam's heart is two sizes smaller than his wallet.

In June, this California attorney tried to strong-arm hugely popular online comic The Oatmeal (aka Matt Inman) into ponying up 20 large to his client, FunnyJunk, to avoid a defamation suit. Instead Carreon found himself up taking on the entire Internet. (He lost.) But his true grinch nature came out when he sued to keep Inman from donating the $210,000 he raised from his supporters to fund cancer research and wildlife preservation. Carreon, who even looks a bit like the grinch minus the green complexion, lost that fight too. We hope he doesn't sue us for saying that.

Remember that "unlimited" data plan you got when you bought your AT&T iPhone? Late last year Ma Bell's bastard progeny, led by CEO Ralph de la Vega (pictured), made good on plans to throttle its most bandwidth-hungry users, and in March it tightened the screws even further. Users with 3G handsets found surfing more like slogging after downloading more than 3GB during a billing period; 4G users hit the wall at 5GB. Southern California truck driver Matt Spaccarelli decided he wasn't going to take that sitting down, so he sued the telecom giant in small-claims court and won, collecting $850. Multiply that by AT&T's 44 million smartphone subscribers -- that would be a gift worth seeing under the tree.

We get it -- if you really want to, you can ruin anyone's life with a few clicks and a handful of tricks. Mat Honan (pictured) can attest to that. The Wired staffer had his life turned upside-down by hackers who were after his @mat Twitter handle but proceeded to break into his Apple, Amazon, and Google accounts and wipe his iDevices clean of all data. Many anguished hours and $1,700 later, he'd managed to recover most of what the hackers destroyed just for lulz. Good joke, guys.

They promised us an apocalypse in 2012, but did they deliver? Noooo. Turns out that when the current Mayan Calendar ends on Dec. 21, a new 5,000-year one starts. So after having gone off our diets, gambled away our life savings, told our bosses exactly what we think of them, professed our unrequited love to several former high school honeys on Facebook, and told the IRS to kiss our assets -- now we have to live with the consequences. Thanks, Maya. Thanks a bunch.